Seeking Out Simple Pleasures in Tokyo

Dream City

I’m having a strange moment here in Tokyo. It’s 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and I’m doing calisthenics in the park with about 50 old ladies I’ve never met before. Bending, twisting, stretching. Following the cadences of a warbly 1920s piano tune that’s playing from a radio up front. I’m completely out of place. I’m completely lost, might as well face it. But while the old ladies hide their smiles and the sun eases up over the ginkgo trees, a cool wind riffles the leaves and I feel paradoxically at home.

Of course, this makes no sense. I only stumbled into this place because I couldn’t figure out how to get back to my hotel. Perhaps this sense I’m having, like I’ve dreamt the whole sequence, is the result of arriving in Tokyo having done no planning other than pre-wandering a neighbourhood of Meguro using Google Maps in satellite view. I even left a brand new GPS-enabled phone at home, opting instead to navigate Tokyo with a wrist-mounted compass bought at a dollar store.

Not my normal travel style, I assure you. I normally plan trips as if I were invading Normandy: guidebooks and memorized subway maps, extensive pre-flight restaurant analysis and time-zone charts left for my wife so she knows the optimum hours to call. But however fond I am of data complexity, I have to acknowledge that not having a clue where I am or what I’m doing is a highly simplified condition.

Simplicity. You’ve probably read about it recently. Blizzards of books and articles by people giving up shopping or winnowing their possessions down to 10. It’s not a new impulse. Simplicity has cycled in regularly over the decades. The Beats, grunge, Slow Food – all these were simplifying movements in reaction to cultural complications of the day. But in 2008, even I would have to admit we really out-complicated ourselves. What was that market crash if not a complexity avalanche: derivatives, Ponzi schemes, NINJA mortgages and credit default swaps? The new simplicity books may be “Thoreau’s Worst Nightmare,” as Mother Jones said, but the phenomenon is real. Consider the fact that Professor John Quelch of the Harvard Business School has already published “The Next Marketing Challenge: Selling to ‘Simplifiers.’”

Beats, grunge, Slow Food – all these were simplifying movements in reaction to cultural complications of the day. But in 2008, we really out-complicated ourselves. What was the market crash if not a complexity avalanche?

But even after Professor Quelch has taught the entire world how to sell things to Simplifiers (which is when complexity will come back in style, mark my words), the fact will remain that the experiences we value most are those that marketers do not devise for us. The chance encounter. The serendipitous discovery. Inexplicable in terms of profit motive, these expe­riences come to us with a tinge of mystery, of destiny or fate. As a result, we connect to these experiences more personally, holding them to be more authentically our own than anything for which we merely kept the receipt. Pushing Quelch’s logic to its conclusion, it’s in that kind of experience that the most authentic simplicity is achieved – in experiences that arise in the moment, when we’re just letting life happen.

That reasoning is why I’m here, doing this crazy thing: Tokyo unplanned. I’m in Rinshinomori Park, as I’ll learn later. I’m participating in the 81-year-old morning ritual of radio taiso (radio calisthenics). But in the moment – as a crow’s shadow flickers over the square and a child’s voice sings out in the distance – I link to an experience of untrammelled simplicity, made possible only by my freedom from strategy or expectation.

Encountered as the product of a plan, the scene would be too easily explained. Encountered this way, it’s magical.

At least, that’s the theory. Turns out, Tokyo is simplicity-resistant, just like me. I make some ground rules for myself. I decide I can ask the advice of strangers. So I’ve been asking people: What’s the most beautiful spot in Tokyo? I get a few leads, but many responses are vague, as if Tokyo’s complexity overwhelmed specific memories. Someone tells me flatly, “Tokyo is the last place on earth you want to explore without a plan. You should prepare one.”

I can’t disagree. In my normal life, I’d have one. But here I’m holding out for experiences on that higher perch: my destined encounters and fated discoveries. So off I go with my non-plan. Snippets of recommendations, hazy pointers. Out through the market streets of Meguro, past the bakeries and coffee shops, the places selling underwear and flip-flops, udon and the ubiquitous curry lunch bowls. Community Muzak plays from speakers like the soundtrack from an old movie. Dozens of shops sell 1960s-era teak furniture, while women yell from under the awnings, hawking strawberries and durian. On the window of a hair salon across the way, a sign reads (in English), “A Million Happiness Is All Around You.” And I feel again the dreamy, familiar, foreshadowed connection as I walk down Meguro-dori – open to anything, in the moment – and pass a place called Dream Japan.